Documentary: The Many Worlds Of Viral Video

Viral video has taken over the web. With over 4 billion hours of video being watched every month on YouTube, everybody is talking about the latest YouTube sensation or viral hit. PBS created an excellent documentary-style video showing us the world of viral video in their latest episode of Off Book.

In the Off Book episode, “The Worlds Of Viral Video” PBS talks with some of the web’s most renowned viral video experts, amongst others Kevin Allocca of YouTube Trends, Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed, Brad Kim of Know Your Meme, Dan Gurewitch of College Humor, Mark Douglas and Todd Womack of Key of Awesome, Casey Neistat, maker of Nike make it count and Bike lanes and Michael Learmonth of Advertising Age to find out about what makes a viral video, how viral video has evolved over time, how brands are jumping on the viral video bandwagon, how viral video is shaping our culture and more.

The documentary is divided into various chapters. The PBS documentary starts with an intro of various popular viral videos (from Susan Boyle to Numa Numa), and continues with “The Rise of Sharing Culture” chapter where PBS looks back at the early viral hits (Charlie The Unicorn and Evolution of Dance).

The next chapter discusses the accidental era (from 2000 to 2006) to the intentional era (emergence of  remix/artist culture), which took viral culture to the next level. From this point on, the advertising (Dove Evolution and Diet Coke/Mentos took the web by storm in 2006) and comedy industry (Will Ferrell’s Funny or Die launched late 2006) started to embrace viral culture.

The next two chapters focus on the power of storytelling and viral video, and looks beyond viral entertainment,  showing us that also dramatic events (from the revolution in Egypt to the bullied bus monitor) can spread very quickly.

The full list of video can be found in this Google Docs document.

How do you think the world of viral video will evolve in the next 5 years?

Source: Social Times

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About the author

Paul van Veenendaal (34) is an all-round marketing professional from the Netherlands with 12+ years of online experience and co-founder of ViralBlog. Currently Paul is working at Starcom Amsterdam as Social Media & Communnity Consultant for Honda, Samsung, GSK, Redbull, Heineken and Nintendo.

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